In recent times, wireless technology has paved the way for several new and useful applications in the field of electronics and communication. One of the important applications of wireless technology is radio-frequency identification technology, popularly known as RFID. RFID is a process of identifying items remotely based on electromagnetic or electrostatic coupling in the RF portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. RFID systems are employed for various purposes such as object or cattle tracking, security, inventory control in retail stores, and the like.
In particular, the retail stores have to cope with the difficulty of keeping a track of their inventory. In a large store, customers often misplace items on wrong shelves while looking for their desired items. It is cumbersome for sales staff in the store to manually locate and arrange the items properly. This leads to loss in sales, incorrect inventory details, and ultimately to loss of profitability for a retailer. One of the commonly used methods to track items in a retail store is barcode scanning. In barcode scanning method, each item in the store is marked with a barcode. To identify an item, the sales staff scans the item and reads the marked barcode using a barcode reader, and accordingly puts the item on a correct shelf. Such a method is time consuming and is susceptible to human errors.
To overcome drawbacks of the barcode method, some stores have begun using the RFID technology to accomplish the task of tracking items in the store. In this, every item has an RFID tag attached to it, the sales staff does not need to manually scan every item to check inventory, but rather check items on a shelf using an RFID reader. This generally saves times, but still involves human intervention.
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